The stockings were hung by the chimney...

This has been a week of house decorating. Not that we have enough Christmas decorations that it takes a week to put them up, that's just how long it takes when you live at our house. Actually we only stepped over and around boxes for three days, so that wasn't too bad. I wasn't going to put up the tree this year since we'll be gone to Texas the entire week of Christmas, but the kids are getting big enough now to really get a kick out of decorating. It also affords the opportunity to talk with them about what Christmas is really all about.

We still only have five stockings hanging, as Elizabeth's is in Texas. Each year there has been a new Himstedt, Mimi has gotten their stocking.

Amelia asked when we were going to decorate the tree again, and I told her next Christmas. In January we would take the tree down and put everything away. She decided that was "the not fun part." She really enjoyed hanging ornaments. Shannon did too. Avery is still enjoying hanging and unhanging and rehanging and carrying ornaments around the house.

The kids pretty much hung all the ornaments themselves. I told them I would be moving the ornaments around, since there were 4 or so hung on random branches in little groupings. Perhaps a less picky mother would have left them all where the sweet darlings had hung them...but not me! Turns out they didn't care, and wanted to help me move them around. So they rehung them in little groupings of 3-4. When most of them were napping I arranged ornaments like I wanted them. My inner need for uniformity and spacing is now satisfied.

It's been a quick week. We had church as usual on Sunday, my riding lesson was rained out Sunday afternoon, but we did get one more Thanksgiving dinner (our fourth) at the Davidsons, as they had an unreal amount of leftovers they were begging for help with. Anything to help a friend. Monday we stayed home and attempted to decorate, Tuesday we made a trip to Gainesville and visited the newly refurbished Walmart, Wednesday we had gymnastics, Thursday we had playgroup here and then went to Rebecca's beautifully decorated Pottery Barn house for dinner, and then it was today. Which is about over. I stay up too late when I do this.

We did have a fun day, though, after a rough night. (More on that in a minute.) Ruth spent the night with us, officially with Amelia, I guess, though might I say I would adopt her if I could? (Okay, Jenny?) After finishing our kindergarten work, we put together a gingerbread house. I looked up information online about how to do one, and was quickly intimidated into buying a kit after that. Perhaps next year if I'm feeling more ambitious I'll do it the hard way.

Here's "before." I failed to get any pictures of kids working on the house because I was: A) Needed to closely supervise the effort and B) Covered in icing. Amelia is wearing her Cinderella outfit. It was last year's Halloween costume, courtesy of Great Grandma Himstedt who made it by looking at a Cinderella book after Amelia decided she wanted to be Cinderella "in her old clothes." We have gotten a lot of mileage out of that costume. (The other day she was wearing it and spilled her milk. As she was mopping it up with a rag she sighed, "Well, at least I'm in the right clothes for this job.")

Amelia squishes the icing bag, per gingerbread house directions.

Shannon squishes...

Elizabeth watches from her perch on the counter. She's officially six months old today!

Avery points out, "There's candy! I see it! Right thar!" (He just developed "thar" as a pronounciation. May as well talk like a country boy since he are one.)

The final product, good enough to eat.

After assembling that one I don't really think making one from scratch could be too much more difficult. It looked so easy in the directions. They just fail to mention things like, "This icing will quickly acquire the consistency of a pencil eraser, so work fast," or "Piping a thick line of icing down the center of the roofline to hold it together won't actually work. The icing and everything you put down that line will slowly sink like quicksand until it falls into the middle of the house. This will happen repeatedly until you figure out you have to cut a strip of cardboard out to plug the crevice and THEN put icing and decorations on top of that."

In spite of a few surprises, it was great fun and I think the kids did a good job. Now I wonder how long it will take for candies to start disappearing off the house...

Can we do a crazy picture?

Back to the rough night part of the story. Apparently James and I are raising an insomniac. For a just turned two year old, Avery seems to function well during the day with large parts of his nightly sleep missing. At least every third night he is out of the bed at 2 or 3 AM. He used to just wander around, now he comes downstairs, grabs the step stool out of the half bath, and uses it to climb up either into our bed or right next to it where his face is at my face, sucessfully SCARING ME HALF TO DEATH. He's not sleepy or stumbling around either, he is wide awake, and sending him back to his bed doesn't always work. Last night he was on one of his nightly treks, and woke us up as he was climbing into the bed between us, at 4:30 AM. This is after I had already taken care of Elizabeth, who at 18 pounds and 6 months old still can't seem to make it through the night without a 3 AM feeding. James told him to go back to bed, and at 5 AM he came down again. I went up with him and put him back in the bed. For the next half hour I keep hearing banging around upstairs. I go BACK up, put him back to bed with threats, and through my fuzzy sleep deprived brain continue to hear little footsteps off an on. Around 6 I go up again and grab him as he's coming out of Amelia's room with a toy (thankfully she and Ruth are still asleep), and bring him downstairs, plop him on pillows in our floor, cover him up, and he's asleep in minutes. At 6:30ish the rest of the crowd is awake, and he's not in our room anymore. The kid doesn't seem to need the sleep! I'm out of solutions. I keep thinking one day he'll either be one of those people who gets a ton of stuff done because he can go on four hours of sleep...or he'll just stay up way too late wasting time on the internet. Or whatever they'll have developed by the time he's an adult.

Speaking of staying up way too late, I'm going to bed. Hopefully to stay, with no interruptions. That would be great.

I leave you with this.

None of our other kids found their feet like this.


Toes. Yum!